Eating Stone (25 page)

The new route would shoot straight across a formidable medium of tumultuous rock with a high-speed four-lane road. Truckers would fly by. Trade would flow. Terrorists would curse and look at the dam in their rearview mirrors.

In its environmental review, the Federal Highway Administration said it had chosen the alternative with the least harm to wildlife, one close to developed areas rather than through undisturbed terrain. Nevertheless, the bypass sliced through routes of traditional sheep movement and twenty acres of lambing habitat. The road might isolate small groups from one another, the review stated. If a local sewage-evaporation pond, used by wildlife as a watering place, had to be fenced, the animals would need a replacement.

At the checkpoint, the exhaust fumes induced hallucinations. I laid my head back, closed my eyes, and counted sheep. Single file, they followed their ancient internal map. One by one, semis and trailers loaded with slick candy red 290-horsepower jet boats smashed them.

Against the monster trio of corporate commerce, the military, and national security, against the public's numb fear, against a million Las Vegans who never drove their stretch SUVs under eighty miles per hour, protests about harm to wild creatures that no one saw were but pitiful peeps. The strategy was to protect the local flora and fauna, not by biology but by mitigation.

The Hoover Dam Bypass design would put high fences on both sides of the new highway. The fence would run along its full length, plus extra on both the Nevada and Arizona ends for good measure. “Out-jumps” provided escape for any sheep accidentally trapped inside the fenced right-of-way. In their movement corridors, sheep would find safe crossings: structures that directed them into at least ten wildlife overpasses and underpasses. A new artificial water source would replace any lost ones.

Was it my imagination, or were things around here a bit Wizard of Oz, backroom console, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?

On the Arizona side of Black Canyon, construction crews gnawed away at the chocolate brown rock. The government had
required that they take “desert tortoise education courses.” Somewhere out there were a stack of gila monster documentation and biologists who monitored bicolored penstemons, peregrine falcons, and any freak-out bleats from bighorn ewes trying to give birth during dynamite blasts. Threatened cactus and other native plants were plucked from the bulldozers’ path and taken to a nursery, to be replanted when the bypass was completed.

In seventy years at this crack of Black Canyon, we had become a sensitive lot.

At the roadblock, I ended my sensitivityfest and started the engine. The line moved forward; the guards became more selective with their random inspections. The scowling state trooper signaled me to stop. He tried to look officious, but I think he was bored and his feet hurt.

What was I carrying under the topper shell at the back of the truck? he asked. Brooms. The congestion was making me edgy. But he was tired and cranky, too, and had to stand in a shroud of exhaust fumes, listening to his chromosomes snap. Camping and other personal gear, I told him, and he waved me through. Without being blown up, I crossed the crest of the dam and drove up the switchbacks on the Arizona side.

The spring sun heated the stone. A thermal on the canyon flanks carried a hawk on its rise. In Chemeheuvi myth, Red-Tailed Hawk hunts bighorn sheep and puts their eyes into the empty eye sockets of his wives. In this, there is both an appreciation of keen vision and a heart-deep craving.

In a Chemehuevi story, Deer, Chuckwalla, and Mountain Sheep traveled together. At the lowlands and foothills, Deer remained. At the foot of the rocky desert mountains, Chuckwalla said, “I'm cold.” Mountain Sheep cracked a rock with his horns. “This will be your house,” he said. “What will you do?” asked Chuckwalla. Mountain Sheep said, “I am going to live in those mountains.”

A shadowed slice of river trickled out from under Hoover's massive wedge, limpid and clear from the slack water backed up behind the next dam downstream. Upstream, on the cliffs above the reservoir, amid clumps of silver bursage, the Lake Mead bovids perched on their day-bed ledges like knickknacks, chewing their cuds and watching the Jet Skis and powerboats crisscross the bottle green water.

Red meat. Four bucks a pound.

The talus slope is a landslide in stasis, fractured black rock spilled from rim to base. Nearly every outcrop and boulder on the talus bears an incised drawing of bighorn sheep.

The sheep lope across the mineral-varnished surfaces. One emerges from a crack into daylight. Some leap; some leave tracks. Their horns curve like rainbows. They have little ears. Heads lift. Necks turn. Legs stretch upward in a vertical climb.

The instinct is to study each rock panel, each petroglyph individually, to aim interest at the details, to sort the details into order or category, to count them. Stop counting. Shut down that part of your brain. Look at the talus again.

There is astounding perspective in the whole of the slope, in its vertical rise and all four hundred feet of its breadth: tiny sheep at the top, midsize sheep in the middle distance, big sheep at the base—this pair, for example, near your feet.

They show their bodies in profile, straight backs and curved
bellies. Their slender legs extend as if in motion. The horns are front-facing arcs with an implied flair. The smaller ram stands above the larger ram as if behind him and more distant from the viewer.

The larger ram seems frozen in place, his neck erect beneath the sweeping double curves. From nose to tail the ram petroglyph is seven feet long: as large as life—larger, in fact. He stands not far from you, as rams have stood before me in the canyon of the Blue Door Band.

Beyond him, the rock drawings form a band of desert bighorns scattered on the ledges. Perhaps you notice, too, the line of etched footprints that “hike” rock to rock up the slope as if following a precipitous path. Perhaps you have heard that when the quartz stone that chiseled these images struck the rock surface, it released sparks of cold, jagged light.

The entire cliff itself is the artist's canvas, you think. A frieze or mural on the broken wall of basaltic lava, a single narrative of what people dreamed or did, or needed to do.

Like flesh-and-blood animals, the stone-carved bighorns array themselves on a steep, perfect sheep cliff with plants to eat, escape terrain, and good views. The highest petroglyphs, the smallest figures, nearly reach the rim. Above them, snowy tufts of clouds float across an ultramarine sky. The animals’ legs bend in an upward run toward the blue, off the stone.

We meet for the first time, shortly after sunrise, in a parking lot in a town in California's northern Mojave Desert. The initial impression is mutual but cordial panic.

For an all-day trek on a hot spring day into a remote desert region used daily by the United States Navy for the rehearsals of war, my guide is a dignified septuagenarian in a tan shirt, navy blue slacks with suspenders, and a straw Stetson. I am wild-
haired and squinty from a grueling road trip, wearing shorts, hiking boots, and a loose white cotton shirt that I have buttoned up funny, although I won't notice the mismatched closure until later.

I see a stranger who may or may not be prone to cardiac arrest on this hike. He sees a disheveled woman who limps and winces because of a hip joint worn down by excess mileage. A third observer might wonder, Will they make it out of the wilderness alive?

I cannot find my notebook and pen. I cannot find my water bottle. Behind the truck's open topper, a plasmic blob of gear lies on the tarmac, as if dropped from above by a passing F-14. Again, I have driven from home in Utah to California. It is beginning to feel like a commute, a westerner's commute, a slide across the earth's curvature from the Rockies nearly to the Pacific, as if I were off to visit a neighbor.

From the road-trip heap, I extract what I need and shove the rest of the wad back into the truck. My day pack is loaded and cinched up.

Because my guide is such a gentleman, I sense humor rather than dread in his skepticism about my preparedness. He has an air of reserved affection and an unspoken curiosity about what, exactly, today's adventure might turn out to be. We size each other up and decide that we are healthy desert curmudgeons who will, today at least, survive a trek in the wilderness. It is implicit: We shall take good care of each other.

I close up the truck—we will drive his vehicle to the trail-head—and reattach to my pocket the clip-on plastic card that identifies me as a visitor to a military preserve that is grimly paranoid about terrorist attacks. I have passed the security check at base headquarters. I am here to see an improbable canyon with several thousand petroglyphs of bighorn sheep. The canyon is off-limits to the public and accessible only with an official escort. Kenneth Pringle straightens his straw hat and asks, “Ready?”

If you want to study lakes, go to the desert. Here, in this far-flung reach of the Great Basin, lie the ghosts of Ice Age water. All waters flow inward. All waters—they come from scant precipitation— drain into closed valleys, where, for the most part, they vanish.

Bone white playas in the surrounding terrain—the Owens, Indian Wells, and Panamint valleys, and a deep valley named Death—form the arid sinks between mountain ranges. The rhythm names the province: basin (alluvium-filled depressions bound by deep faults) and range (ragged, sky-scraping escarpments). The mountains’ granitic ribs run with a north-south grain, pulled apart by an east-west stretch across the basins.

Marooned above the dry valleys, the Coso Range rises dark brown and bald in the morning light. The Cosos are mostly granite, with the added spice of earthquakes and volcanic ruptures, of basalt flows and domes of lumpy rhyolite. The canyons that finger their west flank hold one of the largest concentrations of rock art in the hemisphere.

We head into the shimmering silver-and-white expanse of China Lake, one in the region's chain of Pleistocene lakes, then follow a causeway on its edge. As Ken drives, I rivet my gaze on the ibis and avocets that feed in several acres of shallow water, an evaporating puddle of spring rains and all that is “lake” about China Lake. Ahead lies a low-slung ridge of intrusive igneous rock known as pluton.

As a guest of the military, I think it best to watch birds and ponder the pluton and lumpy rhyolite. Off to the west, obscured by the nervous mirages that hover above the alkali flats, lie things I am not supposed to see. Cruisers? Aircraft carriers? Submarines? The day grows hotter under a sun that tilts the desert toward its fiery summer. A rogue wind lifts diaphanous veils of alkali dust above the playa. Turkey vultures circle a gypsum mound.

“Ken,” I ask, “what the hell is the U.S. Navy doing in the middle of the Mojave?”

In 1943, the Navy set aside more than a thousand square miles of this California desert for ordnance research and testing. Although smaller than White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the Naval Air Weapons Center has the same character: a clear-sky airspace-safe, wide-open expanse of the arid West, ideal habitat for lobbing missiles and rockets. By virtue of its closure to other uses, it forms a huge buffer of accidental wilderness around and beyond the bombed bits. It also presents the full irony of cultural treasures saved from vandals by the secrecy and restrictions of America's war industry.

For nearly forty years, Kenneth Pringle, a physicist, helped blow stuff up. His career postdated the Manhattan Project but fully straddled the Cold War. While nothing nuclear was exploded here (but what do we know?), some bombs need triggers that ignite their core and, as Ken puts it, send the device “into high order.” As a civilian scientist for the navy, he specialized in weapons materials. He is now retired.

Ken has clearance to escort nonmilitary visitors to the rock-art sites in the Coso Range, sites protected by the Naval Air Weapons Station as a national landmark. One of the rock-art canyons is open to the public for escorted, tightly controlled weekend tours. All other sites are closed. In a rare exception, the navy has agreed to let me into one of the closed sites, with Ken as my guide.

I am no stranger to petroglyphs. The abundant engravings of ancient Puebloans surround my home. A panel of flute players, spirals, atlatls, cornstalks, a scorpion, and smatterings of three-inch-high sheep lies a quarter mile from my door. Here, I want to see what is unique about the motif of wild sheep in the Cosos, something I do not see in the redrock canyons of home: life-size bighorns carved into the face of the rock.